Sunday, October 28, 2012

In her brilliant memoir, comedienne Margaret Cho analyzes her life with the skill
of an offbeat poet-philosopher.

I’m The One That I Want
is a tiny gem, hard, tough, searing and unrelenting in its honesty. (It’s that unrelenting honesty that made me
feel weary by the end of the book. But I
felt I’d accomplished something.)

Ms. Cho re-lives a
litany of bad relationships with boyfriends she dislikes/hates and can’t wait
to dump. Three men stand out. Jon and Glenn—the two men she fell in love
with—are incapable of reciprocating her love (not to mention the fact they both
have girlfriends). With the third
man—Marcel, her fiancé--she almost lives out her “wedding fantasy” even though
she is not in love with him.

The book is, at times, stunning, beautiful, unexpected. The scenes of Cho being harassed as a child
by other Korean children at camp are painful to read. In her teen years, she was expelled from high
school to the deep shame of her conservative/traditional Korean parents. Later, in Louisiana, college students booed
Cho while she was on stage. Marcel was a
chance at conventional happiness.

She writes that “it never occurred to me to break up with
him. . . . I’d also miss all the
attention couples who are presumably in love get. . . . People look at you with admiration. I’d see the faraway look that some women
would get, the envy, delicious and cold.
I was not so willing to give up that privilege, no matter how much it
cost me. Everybody thought I was so
lucky.”

One day--once Cho had mentally released her “wedding
fantasy”--she scribbled out a list that ended with, “Find the strength to leave
Marcel.” Weeks later, she was still
engaged, still unable to release the real Marcel. “I cried and cried and tried to stop crying
as I went into the supermarket.” As Cho
waited in line, an elderly lady glimpsed how distraught Cho was and said, “ ‘We
have a while. Do you want to tell me
what’s the matter?’” Eventually, Cho
responded, “ ‘I have to break up with my boyfriend, but I just feel so guilty.’
”

To which the lady said, “ ’Oh, honey, I felt so guilty, I
married him.’ ”

Once she finally released Marcel, “Accepting myself was like
getting to know a new friend.” Cho produced a CD and wrote and opened her
Broadway show, “I’m the One That I Want”—even as she maintained her sobriety
and lost weight (alongside her best friend, her dog Ralph).

Toward the end of the book, Cho writes, “Learning how to
love myself from within, to make my opinion count the most, knowing that no one
and nothing is going to save me except myself—these are the lessons I have been
forced to learn. That is what my life
now is all about.”

“Whenever I start dating someone new, I just can’t hold
back” begins author Giulia Melucci’s
memoir— I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. The Brooklyn-born author goes on to recount her lovelorn days and how
she overfed her ex-boyfriends with an array of scrumptious pasta dishes
(linguini, pastina, rigatoni, spaghetti, etc.).
This “chick lit” book charts Melucci’s fruitless foray into the dating
world: From Kit, her first love, through
Lachlan, the love who inspired her to write this memoir, and all the artfully
cooked meals-and-recipes in between.

Each chapter—with titles such as “The Victory Breakfast,”
”The Ethan Binder School of Cooking,” “Marcus Caldwell Ate and Ran,”—de-constructs
the relationship with each boyfriend.
Most are writers (if not starving, then frugal) Melucci loved, cooked
for, then was dumped by. In the process,
she explores the nexus between gastronomy, appetite, and love.

Toward the end of the book, Melucci explains how she manages
a single woman’s existence in a couple’s world. “My own dinner parties,” she writes,
“are full of couples. . . . And as my guests compliment my cooking, which
feels great, I also have to hear them wonder aloud why it is I'm not married,
which feels awful. The person who brings
it up is usually a man, a man married to a woman who doesn't cook.”

Melucci is well-educated, erudite, cosmopolitan, witty,
employed at the time as an editor/vice-president at Harper’s Magazine. A rock-music aficionado. A wine connoisseur. She knows a soufflé from a sorbet. She jogs, does Pilates, and summers in the
Hamptons.

Sometime after Ethan and before Marcus, I wished Melucci
would go back to Ethan—a Rolling Stone Magazine/MTV writer and her true
love. For they had mutual friends,
interests, and temperaments, each beloved by the other’s family. Instead, she allowed herself to be dumped by
Mitch, who ended his break-up e-mail with, “. . . I just don’t feel like having
a girlfriend right now.”

Then, later, Lachlan–an obscure Scottish novelist when she
met him—who uttered these “plenty perceptive” words: ”The only thing wrong with
you is that you think something is wrong with you. . . .“ After she managed the herculean feat of
getting him an agent, and, ultimately, an enviable book deal, Lachlan
“un-friended” her. He did not marry
her. (To be fair, she seemed to dislike
him by the time of their break-up.)

Toward the end of the book, Melucci purchased her dream
apartment--whose previous tenant found her husband on www.match.com. Hopefully, the apartment is blessed by a
fairy-techno godmother who grants each single female tenant her ultimate
wish. For we desperately wish the author
to find true and lasting love, and to live happily ever after! (Probably, Melucci needs a therapist, a
matchmaker, or both.)

I Loved, I Lost, I Made
Spaghetti is a witty, insightful, fun read as you sprawl on your couch (or,
in warm weather, in your backyard)—in which author Giulia Melucci shares the
angst of being a sassy, independent/co-dependent, single woman in a
cosmopolitan city.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Around the Bloc: My
Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana is an exuberant, energetic,
informative, and entertaining account of Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s
travels: she spent a year studying in
Russia, another year working as a journalist at a Chinese newspaper, and
vacationed for a few days in Cuba.

The author’s first book, Around
the Bloc is divided into three sections, by country. We get to peek into the daily lives of
Russian students. We learn that when
they party, young Russians consume an astonishing amount of vodka.

We also get to hear this unprocessed world view from
Russians themselves. Nadezhda—the
author’s friend, at the time—said, “All Russian women do is try to look good
for men.” An acquaintance said, “Here,
it is very difficult to live.” Karina, a
Russian woman, said, “You American feminists are always fighting for the right
to work, but we’re sick of it!”

My favorite moment in Russia is Griest’s confrontation with
Misha, a twenty-something man she met at a party. Misha liked U2, the music band—“They are the
only American group I can stand”—but he hated America, based on films and TV
he’d seen. He said, “It’s crap, just like
everything else from that country.”

Griest valiantly defended the United States: “I’m the first to criticize my country’s
cultural exports, but, somehow, hearing it from him ticked me off. ‘You don’t
know s--- about my country!’ ” She ends
this exchange by writing, “Determined to have the last word, I screamed: ‘And U2 are Irish, not American, you idiot!’
as he headed out the door.”

But if each traveler is a mini-ambassador for his or her
country, then Griest was a good one: she was sensitive when necessary (as in China,
when the chief editor criticized her at length, she humbly accepted without
comment) and feisty, if unduly challenged (as with Misha). She
drank a cocktail of “snake blood” at a farewell banquet in China. She declined, however, a Cuban woman’s offer to buy the jeans Griest
was wearing.

In China, cultures were at odds. At times, very subtly. For example, when the chief editor, Lao Chen,
requested that Griest work at the newspaper
on a weekend she had planned to spend on vacation. Several times, Griest said she’d made other
plans. Several times Lao Chen said, “So
think about it, and let me know”—or words to that effect. She did not realize this was a request she
should not refuse.

My guess is that of the three countries, Cuba was the most
thought-provoking for the author. She
said as much after Armando, perceptive and self-assured, said: “So why don’t you speak Spanish if your
mother is Mexican?” This question raised
an issue the author has probably wrestled with all of her life. She explained that her mother had been
taunted over her accent while growing up.
Griest’s mother chose to spare her children this embarrassment by
speaking to them in English, with little or no Spanish.

The chapters in which the author discussed her family
history were, for me, the most compelling, the most moving.

Moreover, with typical American openness, she exposed a
couple of her personal issues: for
example, an ex-boyfriend she still carried a torch for.

Anyone interested in life in Russia or China or Cuba—or travel
in general—will enjoy reading Around the
Bloc. The author revealed herself with a frankness
that might embarrass the cows her ex-boyfriend used to milk in Colombia—which
adds to the book’s value. When she
described a cabdriver in Cuba who was happy to remain in his homeland, she did
not judge him.

Around the Bloc is an engaging, fascinating, must-read with
just enough historical information so as not to be boring.

About Me

Yolanda A. Reid is the author of The Honeyeater--a contemporary women's novel about love, heartbreak and betrayal that was a finalist for the 2014 Diva Awards. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in literary journals and e-zines such as “Women Writers: An E-zine”; Starlight Poets; Mysteries of the Lyric World; Many Voices, Many Lands and others. Her first novel--Porridge & Cucu: My Childhood--is about a young girl's adolescence. Her debut poetry collection, SONNETS TO THE JAPIM BIRD, is scheduled for release in June 2017. She lives in the USA.